Following with the previous article on the key attitudes for building a culture of innovation, this is to explain the strategies that make innovation thrive within the organization. First of all, leaders have to be committed, walk their talk, encourage risk-taking and unconventional thinking, and push people to explore beyond their comfort zone. The leaders’ behavior is the main key success factor in the development of a new culture, as they shape others’ behaviors. Many strategies can contribute in building an innovative culture:

Embracing innovation at the leadership level. Assume that innovation is a key driver of the corporate strategy that needs to be fostered throughout the organization. Reflect on attitudes to promote or to change for the leaders to engage management levels.

Identifying new potential leaders. Look for individuals who already act, to some extent, as network brokers and improve their coaching and leadership skills so they can further improve the performance of other people involved in innovation tasks. Give them recognition and further empowerment to lead innovation projects to set an example for the rest.

Creating opportunities for quick success. Especially at the beginning, it is good to have some innovation projects which are likely to be successful in the short term, so as to make people see positive results and boost engagement. A first positive experience is critical to get them involved in an innovative culture.

Providing a sense of empowerment. Everybody needs to know that it is encouraged to question current practices and to bring in fresh new ideas, for which they are to be rewarded. Ultimately, listening to a wider range of insights than you normally hear is the key to promoting original thinking. Everybody’s contribution should be welcome.

Defining the innovation goals and strategy. Choose the innovation that drives growth and helps meet strategic objectives, communicating clearly the expected outcomes. When senior executives ask for innovation in the gathering of consumer insights, the delivery of services, or the consumer experience, they tell employees the type of innovation they expect.

Setting innovation performance metrics. Performance indicators should encompass mainly financial and behavioral metrics. They can also set metrics to foster outsourcing ideas, like requiring a minimum of ideas from outer sources or other innovation friendly behaviors.

Designing innovation networks. Since new ideas spur more new ideas, networks generate a cycle of innovation. By focusing on getting the most from innovation networks, leaders can therefore capture more value from existing resources. Decentralizing networks enhances collaboration and performance for the innovation challenges.

Creating a culture of originality. Many people are capable of creating new ideas, although they need the right environment to do so. By giving employees opportunities and incentives to generate new ideas and setting a meritocratic system, considering the top performers’ opinion for the evaluation of new ideas, organizations boost their innovation performance.

Cultivating cohesion and dissent. Make dissent one of your organization’s core values. Create an environment where people can openly share critical opinions and are respected for doing so. Despite sounding contradictory, a combination of the two is what brings novel ideas to the table while keeping enough harmony in the organization to facilitate cooperation.

Prioritizing organizational values. Give people a framework for choosing between conflicting opinions and allowing the best ideas to win out. Values need to be rank-ordered so that when employees face choices between competing options, they know what goes first.

Leveraging incoming talent. Empower and encourage new hires to challenge “the company way”, so as to bring a new perspective. Their experience may bring in new ideas and approaches, and also contribute to broaden other employees’ mind. It is interesting to hire talent coming not only from competitors but also from other innovative industries.

Mentoring participants to broaden their mind. Innovative thinking requires open mindset to start. This is not only necessary for the innovators themselves, but also for the rest of the organization, to prevent them from becoming innovation anti-champions and sabotage innovation efforts. This mentoring is to make them consider innovation positive for them too.

Educating in the tolerance to failure. Embracing failure is an unavoidable step to succeed in any venture, and so it is for the innovation efforts. Many cultures regard failure as a shameful fact in the performance track record, but organizations focused on and successful with their innovation efforts embrace failure as a natural part of the process.

Creating an incentive system. This is a key strategy to creating trust and engagement. It should not only reward all participants according to their contribution, but also create a framework to build contributors’ reputation, which is eventually taken into account when choosing the appropriate team members for certain projects or to decide upon promotions.

Manage innovation inhibitors. Fear of failure, vertical hierarchy, mistrust and fearful environment, rewarding short-term performance over long-term oriented plans, closeness to new approaches are –among others- cultural attributes that prevent innovation from thriving. Incentive systems oriented towards these behaviors are usually one of the main inhibitors.

Beyond the strategies to create a culture of innovation, leaders need to bear in mind that the key mindsets to build such culture are trust and engagement. As Steven Covey noted, “trust is not some soft, illusive quality that you either have or you don’t; rather, trust is a pragmatic, tangible, actionable asset that you can create –much faster than you probably think possible”. Developing and nurturing trust within your organization is likely to lead to more efficiency, improved teamwork and a better work environment. There are many courses of action that may contribute to building trust among the members of the organization:

Demonstrate trust through employee empowerment. Articulating the corporate values is necessary, but consistently living those values by walking your talk is what actually builds trust. Empowering employees is an actionable and impactful way to show your trust in them.

Commit to transparency and communication. Honest and open communication also helps in building trust. Be sure that your organization has an effective way to share information with employees and be transparent with them as well when they demand it.

Create systems for failure. You want your employees to be active and take initiative. So long as failures are unavoidable at some point, it is important that those who take initiative do not fear it, but rather take the opportunity to learn from every failure to leap forward.

Apart from trust, engagement is another key mindset to develop in order to reach high performance, both in terms of innovation outcomes and in the overall results.

This article is from the Whitepaper “Building a culture of collaboration and innovation” written by Jordi Pera, Founder and CEO at Envisioning Tourism 3.0 Ltd. You may download for free the full Whitepaper at www.envisioningtourism.com/whitepapers

Besides the building of a collaborative culture, destinations 3.0 need also to create a culture of innovation, where not only openness to new ideas is a key shared value, but also the aim for integrating new concepts and approaches into the model is encouraged and all stakeholders are empowered to participate in the innovation process. Managers and employees broadly agree about the values and behaviors that foster innovation.

In accordance with our research, the top attitudes are openness to new ideas and a willingness to experiment and take risks. In an innovative culture, people know that their ideas are valued and believe that it is safe to express them and act on those ideas, and to learn from failure. Leaders reinforce this state of mind by involving employees in decisions that matter to them.

It is broadly thought as well that organizations usually have the right talent or most of what they need, but that the corporate culture is the main inhibitor that prevents them from innovating. Defining and creating the right kind of culture is therefore a must to increase the prospects for successful and sustained innovation.

The top two motivators that promote innovation within an organization are strong leaders who encourage and protect it, and top executives who spend their time actively managing and driving it. Further, an innovation friendly organization should rather have a horizontal hierarchy, allowing all employees and partners to easily access leaders, who are to inspire and influence them through role modelling as disruptive innovators to open their mindsets towards a new set of attitudes:

Questioning by allowing them to challenge the usual assumptions and the status quo to consider new possibilities: What has changed with our stakeholders, or the world at large? What assumptions are we still making about our business that may no longer be valid”?

Observing how things work in other kinds of businesses, which opens your mind to new possibilities. It also enables you to spot new patterns and connections that others might not see – a critical factor for successful innovation.

Networking and permitting to gain radically different perspectives from individuals with diverse industry or cultural backgrounds. Connecting with different realities is critical to open one’s mindset, and this is a necessary step towards fostering an innovative culture.

Experimenting and testing new ideas. Resisting time pressure for quick solutions is the first step, so it is better to think about new solutions before time is pressing. Once the underlying assumptions are challenged, it’s time to try new combinations and procedures.

Associational Thinking— drawing connections between questions, problems, or ideas from unrelated fields—is triggered by questioning, observing, networking, and experimenting, and is the catalyst for creativity.

Beyond these key attitudes to ingrain in order to foster innovation, an upcoming blogpost is to explain the key strategies to deploy in order to make that happen.

This article is from the Whitepaper “Building a culture of collaboration and innovation” written by Jordi Pera, Founder and CEO at Envisioning Tourism 3.0 Ltd. You may download for free the full Whitepaper at www.envisioningtourism.com/whitepapers

When creative minds collide, the most innovative outcome could be expected. Especially, if partners share common passions, values and a craving for challenges. For more than 10 years, the world-famous chefs Albert and Ferran Adrià and Guy Laliberté, founder of Cirque du Soleil, have been sharing ideas on the concept for a new space meant to be a paradigm shift in the world of entertainment, cuisine and art. The result is an international and multidisciplinary project called HEART, which finally has opened doors this summer on the Spanish island of Ibiza.

Certainly, Adrià brothers need nobody to open successfully any new restaurant concept. Neither Cirque du Soleil required anyone else to offer once more a new and unique high-quality artistic entertainment. Albert and Ferran Adrià can be regarded the most well-known brothers in the world of gastronomy, spirit and soul of restaurant elBulli, considered a before-and-after of modern cuisine. Since its beginnings in 1984, Cirque du Soleil shows have thrilled close to 150 million spectators in over 300 cities on six continents.

But HEART seeks to explore what happens when food, music, and art collide and exploration is something you are always better doing accompanied. Secondly, if you excel in one of the components of a mix, why not to look for somebody else that also stands out in the rest of the ingredients? Of course, there is also the multiplier effect of co-branding two well known and highly appreciated names in their respective areas (a good idea even considering not just companies but also personal brands, as we have already seen in some other cases)

The creative partnership is born with good signals. At least as a Co-project. Over the years, el Bulli was always an incubator for new ideas anyway. Adrià brothers are already embarked in some others projects, most of them involving somehow a “creative collision” too. In addition to shows, the Cirque du Soleil Group is already used to extend its creative talent to other spheres of activity. It is expected then to bring to HEART the same energy and spirit that characterize each of its shows.

The presentation below was originally given as a keynote in Taiwan to the Chinese Association of Museums.

Our belief is that the technology like Conducttr can create “intelligent interpretation” – personalized connected experiences that see the museum as part of a deeper ecosystem that includes informal and formal learning.

In the diagram presented here, a cloud-based intelligence understands the learner’s current interest and tailors physical and digital environments to suit.

Note that a common problem for major museums is traffic flow. That is, most visitors want to see the museum’s top attraction. Using Conducttr connected to traffic sensors, guides and screens can be adapted and tweaks to direct visitors to less busy parts of the museum.

What is a SMART destination? These may be defined in many ways. They are destinations that think and advance strategically, improving competitiveness and searching positioning through effectiveness. Becoming a SMART is no more than a strategy to enhance the destination value by leveraging both the cultural and natural heritage, developing innovative resources, improving the efficiency in the production processes and the distribution, which finally propels the sustainable development. This transformation generates positive effects in all sub-sectors such as energy, health services, security, culture, etc. thanks to the cross-destination impact of the tourism activity.

The key concepts that set SMART destinations apart from conventional ones are accessibility, innovation, technology and sustainability. Among these concepts, new technologies are the ones which are more likely to be perceived by the tourist, namely mobile applications, augmented reality and everything related to data smart management.

The development of the SMART concept in destinations consists mainly in working to attain a higher profitability in the daily exploitation of the resources. This is to be achieved by engaging both the local community and the tourists in order to enhance interaction between them. There are already some examples of Smart destinations, such as El Hierro island in the Canary Archipelago. Some of its main achievements are the energetic self-sufficiency and the pollution reduction, which have been achieved through actions such as:

Waste converted into energy

Environment camouflage of telecom and energy facilities and equipment (solar panels, antenna, etc.) within the landscape.

Reduction of the visual impact in the buildings and facilities construction, by using local volcanic stone instead of bricks.

It has gained awareness and branding by sharing and marketing its experiences in the social networks.

Other actions carried out in SMART destinations encompass:

Mobile Applications

Tourism Intelligence System, including data transportation and information Smart management, which altogether turn the destination into a SMART destination.

Smart office; a common working place where to unify processes which produces a work synergy and allows sense and common methodology guidelines in the transformation towards an intelligent city.

Beaches with free wifi

It is important to mention Singapore Smart City, which is on the way to become the first SMART nation worldwide. The country is working on its Master Plan for the next 10 years, which will be focused on the development of smart communities propelled by integration and innovation.

As has happened with the accommodation business, namely with Airbnb, the collaborative platform business model is also developing in the tourist guides business. I have personally experienced one of these platform’s services in the city of Prague.

Thanks to these platforms it is no longer strange that the tourists are offered free guided tours in great urban destinations, without any trick. In my case, I used the services of Sandeman’s New Europe, which is already present in 18 cities. At the beginning of the tour, the guide explained that his income comes from tips, and so it was not mandatory to pay even 1 Euro.

The tour lasted more than 3 hours and it was really entertaining, with good quality content. The guide was brilliant and received quite a lot of tips. But, attracted by the quality of this Guided tour, the day after I did another one, but paying. This business works actually like a freemium model. In fact, there are many more businesses offering free guided tours in Prague. And they have their rivalry moves, like guerrilla marketing actions, competing for the best locations, etc.

But this new fashion not only takes place in the large cities. The Greeters movement is emerging also in smaller cities, like Bilbao. The first company operating this business model in Bilbao is actually called Bilbao Greeters, and is part of the international network Global Greeters Network. The Greeters are locals offering guided tours with the authenticity of a local resident’s knowledge and perspective, who knows the traditions, habits and secrets beyond the usual tourist information available. In the Basque Country the Tourist Guides are not regulated, and so there cannot be any conflict in this case. Unlike in the previous case of “New Europe”, the Greeters are not professional guides and do not accept tips. However, to make a booking you need to be registered as partner, which costs 12€ per year.

Finally, there are many online platforms allowing people to offer their tourist services worldwide. Besides platforms such as Vayable, Viator or Isango, marketing all kind of experiences –from guided tours to cooking lessons-, there are many others offering guided visits by the destination’s residents.

Local Guiding is a platform oriented to “changing the way people travel, experiencing the local life as it is, not like the conventional tourism agencies pretend it to be”. They are already offering guided tours in more than 20 Spanish destinations.

Tours by locals are the veterans in this sector, as they have been operating since 2008 from their headquarters in Vancouver. They nowadays offer guided tours in many countries worldwide.

Like a local is the concept developed through a mobile application. Destination residents contribute to editing the local guide with recommendations, advice, routes, etc. and obtain revenue from the application’s management firm.

Finally, there is the Spanish portal called Ciceroner , promising to offer “unique and personal experiences, the only ones that can be really different and memorable”. It is still in Beta development phase, but it already offers a considerable amount of products in many destinations. It gives the option to gift the guided tours just like Smartbox and many others, but promising a superior experiential value.

As we can see, it is an emergent business model, with many suppliers and intermediaries operating in the market. However, this new fashion business model arouses many questions:

Is it just a fashion or a new reality?

Are these services for specific segments or for all types of visitors?

Is it necessary to further regulate this type of businesses to ensure a fair competition with the traditional models, or should they be given free regin instead?

Are these new models going to operate in urban destinations only, or they are likely to operate in beach destinations traditionally dominated by tour-operators?

Do these business models affect somehow the destinations’ image? Should the DMOs do something to get some profit from it or to manage it for branding purposes?

I invite you to reflect upon these questions, and encourage you to give your opinion

Research and innovation will have a fundamental role in the competitive improvement of destinations. Any policy for the destination development has to include a vision and an innovative orientation that brings some sort of competitive advantage.

In the Spanish economy, the tourism industry has proved to be one of the most dynamic sectors, which generates multiplying effects in the local economies in all sub-sectors directly and indirectly related to tourism. This multiplying effect together with the sector’s evolution worldwide has contributed decisively to increase competition, which in turn makes the industry develop strategies oriented towards the improvement of its competitiveness.

The new market after the changes in the offer and demand, requires tailored services and activities, with high quality standards, which makes attaining customer satisfaction more difficult than ever before. In this regard, tourism offer has to be organized according to the targeted market segments requirements in order to be successful. Unlike in past times, market penetration, promotion, price setting, product quality and quantity are variables defined by the demand and not by the offer, for it is necessary that the service and activity production in the tourism sector takes into consideration this new scenario, and so new destination models restructuring the links and relationships between stakeholders are being developed.

In any case, research and innovation will have a fundamental role in the destination’s competitiveness improvement. Any action for the successful development of the destination has to include a vision and an innovative orientation that can generate some kind of competitive advantage. The main challenges to foster competitiveness in destinations are the following:

Innovate in mechanisms and cooperation formulas and strategic partnerships. It is basic to develop mechanisms that work both from the public and the private scope, to boost new cooperation models between businesses and public-private partnership, as a way to gain profitability, dimension and commitment in the development of the tourist sector.

Innovate to improve the sector’s competitiveness. There should be techniques and strategies to improve the business and the destination’s competitiveness. This includes the development of Innovation Plans for the improvement of business models, management models, service processes and the destination’s business marketing.

Innovate for the introduction of new tourism products and consolidating the profitability of the current ones. It will be necessary to foster the creation of unique tourism products based on new business models, build upon the capacities and unique resources of the destination, with a high experiential value, using the ICT and being socially and environmentally friendly.

Leverage the resources and hidden heritage. It is crucial to develop new formulas for leveraging tourism resources that are complementary to the traditional ones, unknown or unexploited, so as to achieve the profitable consolidation so long as they create an outstanding experience and expand the revenue streams.

Innovate in destination’s promotion and communication formulas. There is nowadays a communicational saturation, which makes it necessary to face the future with promotion innovative mechanisms which allow optimization of the destination’s visibility.

Innovate in tourism product marketing. There will have to be developed new methods and tools to market tourism products, in order to favor the sector’s competitive improvement and control the dependence on external channels, in a way that guarantees some influence power. In this context, it is fundamental to develop strategies to improve the intelligence and the knowledge of the products and its results, and the client and its consuming habits.

Innovate in client relationship formulas. The strategy will have to develop new client management formulas. Starting up innovative mechanisms to do CRM is vitally important not only to retain clients, but also to achieve a more effective marketing.

When we talk about collaborative tourism or tourism peer to peer, we refer to a new trend in the way of traveling based upon sharing basic resources such as accommodation, transport means or personal experiences with other travelers through platforms where the host publishes his/her offer and the tourist makes the booking.

Theoretically, this phenomenon comes from the collaborative economy model, where consumers may also become suppliers by sharing their means with other consumers, also operating on a global scope, prioritizing human relationship above competition and selfishness. The presentation results in being attractive to more and more tourists, who do not really know the business model completely.

Due to the constant transformation of the virtual economy, the task of identifying and describing virtual business models has turned to be quite hard. However, since this P2P platform business model usually determines it’s success, it is no longer unknown: platforms meet the needs of both supplier and buyer, and take a commission from the booked services price.

Checking the four main collaborative platforms operating in Spain for the four types of services available (eating, accommodation, transport and experiences), we find that their revenue sources are not so different from the traditional tourism intermediation models:

AirBnB: charges a commission between 6 to 12%, plus 3% of the conversion rate.

BlaBlaCar: depending on the amount of the transaction, it charges 1,60€ for transactions from 1 to 8€ or a commission of 20% for transactions of more than 8€.

EatWith: it takes a commission of 15% of the transaction.

Trip4Real: it takes 25% of the transaction.

A similar procedure is used for any other tourism intermediary, such as a travel agency, a tour-operator, broker, etc. The difference remains in that these intermediaries comply with the regulations in terms of safety, health and taxes, whereas most of the accommodation and transport means offered in the collaborative platforms do not comply with them.

Therefore, the consumer of collaborative platforms pays a lower price due to the non-compliance with the aforementioned regulations, and takes the risk of suffering any kind of accident without the safety prevention means. Furthermore, despite the social sharing philosophy upon which the platform is created, many suppliers operate for profit rather than for the aim of sharing cost or experiences. However, this is difficult to prove and control.

The hospitality sector’s opinion. The outburst of the tourism collaborative platforms has transformed many housing apartments into competitors for the hotels and regulated tourist apartments, and so it has turned into an important issue for the Public Administration.

According to the Spanish Confederation of Hotels and Tourist Apartments, there are only two possible solutions to this conflict: the total banning of the platform operations –as has happened in many major cities-, or the obligation for the apartments to comply with the same regulations as the current regulated tourist apartments.

It is necessary to take into account that the tourism sector in Spain is hyper-regulated. There are around 250 regulations at the European level referring to intellectual property, consume, safety and payment means, plus those from the local administration. All in all it entails a great deal of costs that do not apply to the collaborative platform operators, including the VAT, the police files, fiscal and sanitary costs. This is clearly a case of unfair competition. In this regard, there are many points to consider:

The regulations applying to these tourist housing apartments are different for every region in Spain, for it is necessary for the destination regulators to study them all in detail.

It is necessary to consider the product separately from the platform, taking into account that the platform operation is similar to the traditional channels such as the travel agencies, and so the same regulations should apply.

The evolution of the global society is likely to propel this paradigm beyond the current conditions, demanding solutions in terms of adapting the new regulation and policies.

As it has been explained in many posts, collaboration is at the core of destinations 3.0. However, we have focused on the collaborative efforts to co-create or co-innovate with the participation of both individuals and businesses. Another type of collaboration is that of the sharing economy, nowadays in the spotlight because of business models such as Uber or Airbnb, based on peer to peer (P2P) collaboration in sharing resources.

But, what about business-to-business sharing? B2B initiatives of the sharing economy may not be as well known as B2C’s, but some analysts consider the real power of peer-to-peer exchange may be found in B2B transactions, as businesses could better leverage the potential financial and operational benefits of jumping on the sharing economy bandwagon.

But first, it is necessary to be clear about what “sharing” means. Sharing Economy is a term currently used to designate many different ideas that could be also tagged with so disparate concepts as “gig economy” or “collaborative economy”. For the sake of the argument a sharing economy initiative could be described as one activating idle resources for usage, facilitating the paradigm of access versus ownership, and using technology to enable the matching between idle resources and its demand.

There are still many barriers to B2B sharing…

Key differences between B2B and P2P sharing may explain why you might not have heard as much about the B2B sharing economy as you have about B2C/P2P. For start, there is the cultural mindset we have mentioned so often in here: businesses have been shaped for decades to be competitors, not collaborators. The kind of relationships are used to is exclusively transactional. Owning more and better assets than others is supposed to be a key factor for success. Sharing resources does not come naturally to them, even if there is a benefit for doing it.

Then, there is also the legal hurdles or gaps that many P2P or B2C sharing initiatives are still sorting out. These hurdles are understandably more intimidating in the case of business to business interactions. Finally, the quality and user experience of the sharing economy services is also a factor to take into account. While a disappointing experience is not usually going to discourage a consumer to try again a particular P2P service choosing another peer, a business is less likely to pay for shared services when a bad experience could have a more significant consequences than, for instance, a driver too talky or too quiet in a shared ride.

… but its benefits could tip the scales

But these particular barriers for B2B sharing might be rapidly overcome as the economic environment compels business of all kind of shapes and sectors to leverage its benefits. The promising area of shared commercial services is vast and varied in its potential environmental and economic impacts. Certain B2B sharing services could provide many businesses, especially SMEs, with access to once inaccessible resources that those companies have no way to access if not through sharing. Besides, sharing resources streamlines companies, enabling them to operate faster. It can also allows them to react quickly to market changes in a less expensive and more efficient manner.

For instance in manufacturing, where the increasing versatility spur by flexible manufacturing technologies allows companies to share their production facilities and equipment much easier than in the past. Or in areas related with a bigger pressure for sustainability, where sharing large assets with significant carbon footprints as cars, trucks, industrial equipment or buildings can help to reach environment-friendly goals.

Some examples

The number of B2B sharing economy platforms is still low compared with their P2P counterparts, but some business-to-business players are already enabling businesses to share access to assets as such office space or underutilized machinery:

Sharemyoffice.co.uk lets businesses anywhere in the world advertise their spare desks or office space providing a portal for startups to find their first commercial business space.

Yard Club Rental, recently acquired by Caterpillar, provides a way for construction companies to share their equipment by renting it out when not in use by their own companies.

Floow2is about sharing between companies every aspect of the supply chain… and more. The most popular categories are cars, trucks, meeting rooms, aerial platforms, communication specialist and designer (yes, professionals can also be shared).

Effective cooperation between local stakeholders is one of the key success factors for Tourism 3.0 to thrive, but this cooperation needs to be well focused on strategic goals, in a way that many different types of cooperation may be developed. This article explains how SMEs in the same region create an alliance developing four types of cooperation to gain and advantageous position in the international market.

Five companies in the IT sector from the Basque Country (Spain) have set up the Smart Factory alliance aiming to boost their internationalization and being able to obtain contracts with large companies. The alliance will allow partners to offer integral Industry 4.0 solutions to manufacturing companies.

Four types of collaboration. Each of the five companies is specialist in several areas, so the alliance adds on the competence and solutions of each of them, promoting a more integrated, specialized and competitive offer. According to Tomás Iriondo, CEO of Gaia, an industry cluster promoting the initiative, “by working together, these companies can now address more distant, larger and more complex clients thanks to a collective solutions map and a portfolio that becomes one of the widest for Industry 4.0 demands”.

To strengthen the partnership, Smart Factory Alliance has established four types of collaboration. Shared knowledge is considered the most important one. And the most critical, as this sharing will only be possible if first a climate of trust among partners is created. Another two kinds of collaboration will involve common communication strategies to reinforce visibility, and detection of customers and projects. Finally, setting up the Alliance comprised also the technical integration of products and software developed separately by each of the companies partnering.

The Basque culture has collaboration as one of the key values that make it more competitive than its neighboring regions’. It has proved to succeed in many other cooperative ventures. For instance, three years ago, ten Basque companies in the designer furniture and equipment sector joined forces to grow in the retail market. This is a subsector in the world of specialized furniture and equipment for all types of shops in which customers include from a single store to chains, franchises and brands, and large commercial areas or the design of showroom. It’s a huge market but competing for global customers requires a wide range of services.

Creating a common brand, Basque Retail, they can now meet this challenge because each of the firms has a specialized portfolio (furniture, security lights, wood cladding, design lamps …). The alliance makes possible for them to offer complete projects, that is to say, to ‘dress’ from top to bottom a single commercial site or hundreds of stores from the same chain or franchise.

Each one of the companies partnering at Basque Retail keep its own activity coexisting with the one generated by the common brand. The alliance is been possible despite being very different businesses. Some of them are small companies and never worked internationally, some others have been exporting for years. Turnover, sales and products are quite different, but their goal is the same one: to be able to offer a comprehensive solution to both a customer with a single store and one that has a thousand.

Collaboration leading to more collaboration. Internationalization has been also a main driver. Just recently, Basque Retail and its solutions were presented in Düsseldorf during the main global trade show for this sector. For most of partners in Basque Retail, with their sales limited to Spanish market until recently, been able to have a stand in Düsseldorf would have been unthinkable just few years ago.

Currently, close collaboration between companies is working so positively and leading to so many new ideas that they are even considering to create a new collaborative sub-brand focused on “sensorial marketing”, an increasing demand from brick and mortar commercial sites competing with online e-commerce.